From: "Ted White" <twhite8 at cox.net>
To: "WSFA members" <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Re: fw: one more thing to worry about
Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2003 02:04:33 -0400
Reply-To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>

----- Original Message -----
From: <ronkean at juno.com>
To: <WSFAlist at keithlynch.net>
Sent: Saturday, June 28, 2003 1:22 AM
Subject: [WSFA] fw: one more thing to worry about

>
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.07/doomsday_pr.html
>
> Chain reactions
>
> The fear that scientists tinkering with the elementary components of
> matter might unleash disaster has a rich and distinguished history.
> Before the detonation of the first atomic bomb at Trinity Site in 1945,
> Robert Oppenheimer worried that the unprecedented heat might spark a
> fusion chain reaction in the atmosphere. Physicist Hans Bethe performed
> calculations proving the planet wouldn't ignite, and the test went
> ahead.
>
> The possibility of runaway chain reactions reemerged when scientists
> began deploying advanced particle accelerators, like the Cosmotron built
> at Long Island's Brookhaven National Labs in 1952. Some scientists
> worried that slamming protons into antiprotons at extremely high
> velocities might generate an unnatural subatomic template to which other
> particles would bind, collapsing matter into a void, possibly for vast
> distances. Panels of earnest researchers met to discuss whether
> high-energy physics experiments might crush the planet out of existence.
> They decided the risk was insignificant, but their concern was reflected
> in Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle, in which a researcher
> inadvertently creates "ice-nine," a template molecule that turns water
> into a solid at room temperature. When a bit of the stuff falls into the
> sea, all water on Earth quickly solidifies, including the water in
> living things.

Ah, it was magical then.

> Martin Rees, who has taken part in panels evaluating the safety of
> particle accelerators, has revived the idea that high-energy physics
> could accidentally destroy the world. In his new book, Our Final Hour,
> Rees worries that power improvements in atom smashers like Brookhaven's
> new Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider might make these machines capable of
> creating a black hole that would scarf up the globe. Ever more powerful
> accelerators, he fears, might create a "strangelet" of ultracompressed
> quarks - the smallest known units of matter - that would serve as an
> ice-nine for the entire universe, causing all matter to bind to the
> strangelet and disappear. Since, fundamentally, matter seems to be made
> of very rapidly spinning nothingness, there may be no reason why it
> couldn't spontaneously return to nothing.
>
> "The present vacuum could be fragile and unstable," Rees frets in his
> book. A particle accelerator might cause a tiny bit of space to undergo
> a "phase transition" back to the primordial not-anything condition that
> preceded the big bang. Nothingness would expand at the speed of light,
> deleting everything in its path. Owing to light speed, not even advanced
> aliens would see the mega-destructo wave front coming. In other words, a
> careless Brookhaven postdoc chopsticking Chinese takeout might
> inadvertently destroy the cosmos.

Donald Westlake used this concept in a quasi-mystery-fantasy novel a few
years ago.

--Ted White